An evening pause: To start our weekend let’s go cavern diving in Kin Ha Cavern in Mexico, also called a cenote. This is not exploration, but a commercial cave for divers, following a preset life line.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Alpha Divers – Kin Ha cavern in Mexico
The bunny is so fast I missed one: Last night, only a few hours after SpaceX launched two satellites for Maxar, out of Vandenberg in California, the company followed this with another launch of 23 Starlink satellites out of Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 19th launch, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leader board that I posted earlier today for the Chang’e-6 launch thus gave the wrong totals for SpaceX and the American launch industry. Below are the corrected numbers for the 2024 launch race:
46 SpaceX
18 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 53 to 30. SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 46 to 37.
Hat tip to reader MDN to letting me know.
Lockheed Martin yesterday withdrew its early March offer to buy the satellite manufacuture Terran Orbital, purchasing the shares it did not already own for approximately $500 million.
No reason was given, but it appears the other shareholders at Terran Orbital objected to the purchase, and Lockheed probably decided the fight wasn’t worth it.
In that proposal, Lockheed offered to acquire the roughly two-thirds of Terran Orbital stock it did not already own. Lockheed also proposed to pay more than $70 million to buy outstanding stock warrants and either assume or repay $313 million in Terran Orbital debt, putting the total value of the proposal at more than $500 million.
Lockheed, besides being a major investor in Terran Orbital, is a major customer of the company, buying dozens of its smallsat buses for programs such as satellites for the Space Development Agency. Lockheed said in its offer letter that it accounted for 81% of Terran Orbital’s backlog.
Terran Orbital responded to the proposal March 4 with a stockholder rights plan, or “poison pill” move, to prevent a hostile takeover. It acknowledged the proposal and said an independent board committee would evaluate it as part of an ongoing strategic review.
Both companies now say they will continue to work together in the future.
The bunny rolls on. SpaceX today successfully launched two commercial Earth imaging Worldview Legion satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage successfully completed its 20th flight, landing back at Vandenberg. This is the third Falcon 9 booster to fly twenty times. SpaceX now has two such boosters in its fleet, and is now working to upgrade its whole booster fleet to capable of flying forty times. The two fairings on this mission also completed their thirteenth and sixteenth flights, respectively.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
45 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 52 to 29, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 45 to 36.
In a pattern that should surprise no one, the government-owned internet satellite constellation proposed by the European Union to compete with private constellations such as Starlink and OneWeb is now in trouble and faces significant delays, partly because its budget has already doubled, even before anything has been built, and partly because there is friction between the various European countries tasked with building it.
A new report in a German publication, Handelsblatt, provides information on some likely causes of the delay. The report indicates that the cost estimate for the Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²) constellation has doubled from an initial estimate of 6 billion euros to 12 billion. Additionally, the project is exposing long-running fault lines between Germany and France when it comes to European space policy.
…Germany, which alongside France is likely to be the main financial backer of IRIS², is not happy that most of the prime contractors are based in France or linked to the nation. … And finally, it appears the operations for the constellation will be based primarily in Italy.
In other words, this government project is not being run to make a profit, but to distribute contracts to various countries in the European Union. Under these conditions, it is guaranteed to fall behind scheduled, cost a fortune, ald lose gigantic amounts of money.
These European countries are already shifting away from this failed model, abandoning its government-run rocket company Arianespace to instead encourage competing private rocket companies. It is therefore no surprise that many member countries in the EU are now having second thoughts about building this government-run satellite constellation.
Nonetheless, EU officials want Europe to have its own internet satellite constellation. Getting it however is problematic. There presently are no continent-based companies capable of building and launching it. And a government built and owned constellation is guaranteed to fail in any attempt to compete on the open market.
The company Maritime Launch, which has been building a new spaceport in Nova Scotia since 2016, has abandoned its original concept of providing both the launch facilities and rocket for satellite companies, and will instead make its launch facilities available to all rocket companies.
In an interview with The Journal last week, Matier – who started the spaceport project in 2016 to launch satellites with Cyclone-4M rockets it intended to buy from a Ukrainian manufacturer – said geopolitical realities in Eastern Europe now makes that approach unworkable. “We can’t get the rockets out of Ukraine,” he said. “So, we’ve pivoted away from a customer-supplier relationship with [them] … There’s such huge demand for satellites going into orbit that there’s all these [other] rockets in development that don’t have a home. The bottleneck is really the spaceport, and that’s what we’re addressing.”
According to the article at the link, the spaceport is already negotiating with an unnamed European rocket company to do an orbital launch by 2025. Matier also said there will a suborbital launch at the spaceport this summer, but offered no details about the rocket or payload.
Click for original image.
The Japanese orbital tug start-up Astroscale announced yesterday that it is becoming a publicly traded company on the Tokyo stock market, beginning June 5, 2024.
The company plans to offer 20.8 million shares in the initial public offering, but has not announced a share price. According to filings with the exchange, Astroscale will set that price May 27.
Astroscale has raised more than $375 million through a series of private rounds, most recently a $76 million Series G round in February 2023. That funding has primarily come from Japanese investors, including a strategic investment by Mitsubishi Electric in that Series G round.
The company has also won two major contracts with Japan’s space agency JAXA, building its two ADRAS-J missions to first rendezvous and survey an abandoned upper stage (as shown to the right) and then fly a grapple mission to de-orbit that stage sometime in the future.
An evening pause: Performed 2010 by the Moscow City Symphony, dancers Inna Svechnikova and Dmitry Chernysh.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
NASA today released the details for its public media coverage of the first manned launch at 10:34 pm (Eastern) on May 6, 2024 of Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
NASA will provide live coverage of prelaunch and launch activities for the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test, which will carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to and from the International Space Station.
Launch of the ULA (United Launch Alliance) Atlas V rocket and Boeing Starliner spacecraft is targeted for 10:34 p.m. EDT Monday, May 6, from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The flight test will carry Wilmore and Williams to the space station for about a week to test the Starliner spacecraft and its subsystems before NASA certifies the transportation system for rotational missions to the orbiting laboratory for the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
Starliner will dock to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at 12:48 a.m., Wednesday, May 8.
Though that coverage includes several prelaunch and post launch press conferences, the key coverage of the launch itself will begin at 6:30 pm (Eastern) on May 6th, about four hours before the launch itself. It will also include the capsule’s docking with ISS on May 8th.
I will embed NASA’s Youtube live stream here on Behind the Black on both dates, though as always I sugggest waiting until just before launch and docking to tune in. The four hours of streaming prior to launch is mostly going to be NASA propaganda, touting the agency and often misconstruing the facts to overstate its importance. This launch will be just like SpaceX’s Dragon launches, in that almost everything will be run by the two private companies involved, Boeing and ULA, and not NASA. NASA’s real involvement will only begin at the docking to ISS.
This first manned flight of Starliner is long past due. It was supposed to occur about four years ago, but numerous technological and management problems at Boeing forced many delays. Getting that capsule operational will finally give NASA two American companies capable of putting humans in space. It will also offer some competition to SpaceX, though this competition will be weak until Boeing can demonstrate Starliner’s reliability.
Capitalism in space: NASA is now asking the commercial space industry to tell it which of 187 “technology shortfalls” it should give priority to for funding.
The agency has released a list of 187 “technology shortfalls,” or topics where current technology requires additional development to meet NASA’s future needs. The shortfalls are in 20 areas ranging from space transportation and life support to power and thermal management.
Through a website, the agency is inviting people to review the listed technologies and rate their importance through May 13. NASA will use that input to help prioritize those technologies for future investment to bridge the shortfalls.
This decision illustrates well NASA’s effort in the past decade to shift from being the boss which tells the space industry what to do to becoming a servant of that industry. In the past NASA would focus solely on what it considered its needs in deciding what new technology to fund. Often that would result in projects that NASA considered cool, but were dead-ends commercially, never used by anyone.
Now NASA wants to function more like it used to prior to 1957, when it was called the NACA. Then it worked to provide the engineering data that the aviation industry requested. This change is great news, because it means that NASA’s many small technology development contracts will better serve the needs of the industry and its need to make profits, rather the government’s wish list of projects, some of which serve no one’s real need.
Two of the world’s largest and oldest satellite companies of merging. The Luxembourg satellite company SES today announced that it is buying outright the American-based satellite company Intelsat for $3.1 billion in cash.
The companies announced April 30 that they had agreed on the deal, subject to regulatory approvals. SES will pay $3.1 billion in cash along with certain contingent value rights for 100% of Intelsat. The transaction is not expected to close until the second half of 2025.
SES said it will fund the deal through existing cash on hand, which it estimates to be $2.6 billion at the end of March, along with debt. The combined company would have about $4.1 billion in annual revenues and estimated adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $1.9 billion this year. The combined company will remain headquartered in Luxembourg, where SES is based, but will maintain a “significant presence” at Intelsat’s home in the Washington, D.C., area.
These companies had tried to put together a merger deal in early 2023 but those negotiations failed.
This merger continues the consolidation of the older satellite companies that have for decades been focused on building larger high-orbit geosynchronous satellites and are now feeling great competitive pressure from the low-orbit constellations of Starlink and OneWeb.
Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) is in the process of taking control of the Vega family of rockets away from its commercial arm, Arianespace, and returning that ownership to the Italian company, Avio, that builds those rockets.
In late 2023, ESA member states agreed to allow Avio to market and manage the launch of Vega C flights independent of Arianespace. When the deal was initially struck, 17 flights were contracted through Arianespace to be launched aboard Vega vehicles. While these missions are still managed by Arianespace, Avio is working with the launch provider to strike a deal that would allow the Italian rocket builder to assume the management of all Vega flights.
The article’s focus is on a new contract that ESA has just awarded to Vega through Arianespace. noting that this contract will likely be shifted to Avio before launch in 2025.
This decision continues the process of slowly killing off Arianespace. Instead of relying on this government entity to build and market its launch operations, ESA is instead going to become a customer only, relying on competing commercial rocket companies for its launch services. When Avio completes its takeover of Vega, Arianespace will only be responsible for the Ariane-6 rocket, which is built by ArianeGroup and essentially owns it as well. Expect that rocket to be shifted completely to ArianeGroup. At that point Arianespace will no longer have any reason for existing, and will be shut down.
In the fall of 2023 officials of the European Union (EU) announced that they expected to release the Union’s own space law, that would regulate the individual space laws of all member nations. Since then the release of that law has been put back several times, and in early April its release was delayed until the summer, after the EU elections in June.
This article published today provides the likely reasons why it has been delayed. Apparently, individual members of the EU have objected to the law as interfering with their own space laws as well as imposing regulations they don’t want or need.
The EU Space Law will need to overcome several obstacles to become a functional and beneficial piece of legislation. Several EU Member States already have national space legislation and are actively engaged in space activities, while an increasing number are adopting domestic frameworks and expanding their presence in the space sector. In a heavily regulated environment, where countries have long established and enforced national laws, the practical implementation of a space law at the EU level may be contested.
The article then lists three reasons for these objections. First, the EU has no experience or stake in this matter. It launches nothing and thus can only pose an additional obstacle to the growing commercial space industries in member countries. Second, an EU space law is certainly going to conflict with the space laws of member countries. Third, this law’s implementation could significantly interfere with the legal timelines established by individual member countries.
The article also lists three reasons why the EU law might be good, but these reasons really can be summed up as attempting to justify the EU’s power grab over the space efforts of the member countries.
In the end, this analysis tells us that the EU’s power grab has been met by significant opposition behind the scenes, and could very well die because of that opposition. Germany, Italy, Spain, and more recently even France have begun to encourage the development of independent competing rocket companies, and all likely fear this EU space law will only get in the way.
Link here The details come from a presentation at a public meeting by Amit Kshatriya, Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA’s Moon to Mars program, with this the key takeaway:
Kshatriya then expanded the discussion beyond the next few Starship flights and talked about the required technologies for a fuel depot in orbit and the in-orbit capabilities needed to transfer fuel. “We need an instance of the ship that is essentially long, has the endurance to stay in orbit long enough for the sequence to work.
“So, we need a ship that has at least three to four weeks of endurance in orbit. That endurance is gained through augmented power system capability, augmented battery capacity, full insulation of the cryogenic systems, vacuum jacketing of all the lines, et cetera, to make sure that the cryogens that are being stored or are meant to be stored don’t boil off.”
The challenges of a cryogenic ship in orbit include the need to prevent boil-off from the stack. To facilitate the journey to the Moon’s surface, Starship will have to be refueled. For this, the company plans to refuel a depot in low-Earth orbit (LEO), which would be resupplied by several tanker Starships. The HLS Starship would then dock with this depot before departing for the Moon.
To prove this system will require a Starship test flight that lasts several weeks in orbit, to prove the capability needed for a lunar mission. It will also require a refueling mission that will require several Starship/Superheavy launches, one to put the fuel depot into orbit, several more to fuel that depot, and a final launch of Starship for its refueling and endurance test.
According to the update, SpaceX is still aiming to be ready of the upcoming fourth Superheavy/Starship demo orbital flight in the first two weeks. The NASA official claimed it would occur no later than the end of May. I see that as a confirmation that NASA really doesn’t expect the FAA to issue a launch permit when SpaceX is ready, and that the permit might not arrive in time for a May launch. This statement is meant to soften the blow when the launch finally gets delayed into June, or later.
Whether the many required later Starship launches as described above can get FAA approval quick enough to prove out this system soon enough to meet NASA’s 2026 present target date for its manned lunar landing seems very unlikely. Moreover, even if it does it will be a major challenge for SpaceX to meet this schedule.
March on bunny! SpaceX today successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its thirteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
44 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 51 to 29, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 44 to 36.
SpaceX today successfully launched two satellites of Europe’s Galileo GPS-type satellite constellation, the first of a two-launch contract awarded to SpaceX when the Soyuz rocket was no longer available because of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and Arianespace’s Ariane-6 rocket was not yet operational.
The first stage completed its 20th flight, tying the record set by another booster only a few weeks ago. Because of the high orbit required by both satellites, that stage was not recovered, the first time SpaceX has expended a first stage since November 2022. SpaceX however also announced that the company is now working to upgrade its Falcon 9 first stages and fairings to fly as many as 40 missions. The two fairings also completed their fourth flight, which brought the total of fairings SpaceX has recovered to 200.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
43 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 50 to 29, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 43 to 36.
The European Space Agency (ESA) this week did a major shake-up in the management and structure of its ClearSpace-1 space junk removal mission that had previously been awarded to the Swiss orbital tug startup Clearspace.
Moving forward OHB SE will take over the responsibility of leading the ClearSpace-1 consortium. The Bremen-based company will provide the satellite bus and will be in charge of system integration and launch. ClearSpace will be responsible for the close proximity and capture operations once the vehicle is in orbit.
In addition to the change in leadership, the mission’s target has also been adjusted, with ClearSpace-1 now expected to rendezvous and capture PROBA-1. The 94-kilogram ESA technology demonstrator was launched aboard an ISRO PSLV rocket in October 2001.
The original target, a payload adaptor from a 2013 Vega launch, had been hit by another piece of junk, damaging it and making it a much more difficult target to grab, using the four grapple arms of the Clearspace spacecraft. No timeline for when this revised mission will fly was announced.
According to a presentation given by a NASA official at a conference in London yesterday, the first launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is now targeting a September 29, 2024 launch.
In a presentation at a meeting of a planetary protection committee of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) in London April 24, Nick Benardini, NASA’s planetary protection officer, listed a Sept. 29 date for the launch of Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, a pair of smallsats that will go into orbit around Mars to measure the interaction of the planet’s magnetosphere with the solar wind.
NASA selected Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to launch ESCAPADE, awarding the company a $20 million task order through the agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare contract in February 2023 for the mission. The award at the time mentioned only a late 2024 launch, with the expectation that ESCAPADE would be on one of the first, if not the first, flight of the rocket.
Benardini mentioned ESCAPADE in his COSPAR presentation to discuss how the mission was complying with planetary protection requirements, intended to prevent any contamination of Mars, during the assembly of the spacecraft and launch preparations at Cape Canaveral. “They’re slated to be launching Sept. 29 with Blue Origin,” he said.
This is the first time any source at NASA or Blue Origin has revealed a specific launch date. The rocket was originally supposed to fly its first orbital test flight four years ago, but numerous delays, mostly related to the BE-4 engine used by the rocket’s first stage as well as decisions by the company’s former CEO, Bob Smith, to slow all development, pushed that launch back repeatedly. With Smith leaving late last year, the company has suddenly come back to life, with many indications that it was pushing for a launch this year.
An evening pause: Hat tip Judd Clark, who gives this background, “Written by Billie Holiday, who first recorded it on April 20, 1939 on the Commodore label. Performed by Billie Holiday in 1957 in a television special, The Sound of Jazz.”
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has now issued the range license for the Saxavord spaceport on the Shetland Islands, following up issuing it a spaceport license in December.
A range licence is a legal requirement ahead of a space launch, but is not in itself permission to launch. This licence grants the broad approval to provide ‘range control services.’ Specifics will depend on the launch vehicle and will be outlined as part of relevant launch licences.
Work by the Civil Aviation Authority continues in assessing potential launch operators from SaxaVord.
Sounds good, eh? Not so fast. It took the CAA about two years to issue these two spaceport licenses, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to launch from Saxavord. The CAA must still issue launch licenses to the specific rocket companies wishing to launch. Though the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg wants to do the first orbital test flight this year from Saxavord, it still must get that launch license. Do not be surprised if it takes the CAA more than a year to issue it.
Capitalism in space: Japan’s space agency JAXA has now awarded the orbital tug startup Astroscale a contract to complete the removal of an abandoned upper stage from a previously launched rocket.
Astroscale has already flown the first phase of this project, with its ADRAS-J tug flying in March and April a demo rendezvous mission with the rocket stage, getting to within several hundred meters of the stage. The second phase, now approved, will grab the stage with a robot arm and then de-orbit it. No date for the launch of that second phase was announced.
An evening pause: From the youtube page: “I wanna be the best dancer in the world.”
Hat tip Tom Wilson.
A cartoon showing Apophis’s path in 2029
At a conference this week several new missions to the asteroid Apophis during its close Earth fly-by in 2029 were proposed by both private companies and government entities.
With all of these missions, the big obstacle is funding. Most are either only partly funded, or not at all.
At the moment the only mission actually on its way to Apophis is OSIRIS-APEX, which having completed its sample return mission to Bennu was then sent to Apophis.
Both SpaceX and Rocket Lab successfully completed launches today. First SpaceX launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
Shortly thereafter, Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket lifted off from one of its launchpads in New Zealand, placing two technology demonstration satellites in orbit, one testing a solar sail from NASA and the other from South Korea testing a cubesat doing optical observations of Earth. Though the first stage had the markings of a stage designed for resuse, there was no indication in the company’s live stream of any attempt to recover it.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
42 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 49 to 28, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 42 to 35.
An evening pause: Performed on the organ of Rochdale Town Hall, Rochdale, UK.
Hat tip Judd Clark. To all: I could use suggestions from others. Right now Judd is doing the lion’s share of work, suggesting a lot of great evening pauses. I want more variety, however, including suggestions from many others. If you have suggested something before you know the routine. If you haven’t and want to, post a comment here, but DON’T post the link in your comment. I will contact you for it.
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.
The German rocket startup Hyimpulse today announced that its first suborbital rocket, the SR75, had arrived in Australia for its planned first test launch.
On 28 February, Southern Launch, the commercial outfit that manages the Koonibba Test Range, revealed that a launch attempt of the suborbital SR75 rocket would occur between late April and early May. This likely gives the team little room for the unexpected as it prepares for launch.
Those launch dates depend on whether Australia’s government will issue the launch licenses on time. So far its ability to do so in a timely manner has been difficult if not impossible. For example, the rocket startup Gilmour, which wants to launch from Bowen at about the same time, has been waiting more than two years to get its approval, delaying its first orbital test launch by more than a year.
